Curiosity overwhelmed me

After a friendly post on Havok’s forum in response to a question of mine, I decided to spend a couple of days looking into how difficult it would be to implement a relatively simple 64 bit fixed point physics backend.

The idea would be to utilize an existing collision detection library like SOLID or OPCODE, convert it to use fixed point instead of float, and implement simple impulse and velocity effects within their framework. I’d probably use Collada for the triangle lists as it is quite complete and mature. I’d have to write some code to convert from Collada to the collision framework’s formats.

As it turns out it should not be all that difficult, and I’ll probably head into that at some point. There are of course trade-offs in speed using large fixed point numbers as opposed to floats, but what I’m contemplating would not need a great degree of local precision but would require the extremely large numbers (2^47 or approx 144 trillion) offered by using 64 bit internals.